Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush, for example, boasted of that military as alternately “the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world” and “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” Hyperbolic and self-promoting statements, to be sure, but undoubtedly sincere, reflecting as they do an American sense of exceptionalism that sits poorly with the increasingly interconnected world of the twenty-first century.

The "Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef" is, amazingly, just what it sounds like: an enormous crocheted coral reef created by hundreds of local crafters, a spinoff from the worldwide Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project.

The book contains beautiful, lyrical, literary passages, and some noteworthy reflections on life, but it fails in my opinion both to develop characters to a point where I care about what happens to them, and on the same note, to construct a plot of any complexity … Hyperbolic approbation threatens to gut all meaning from words commonly used by literary critics to denote greatness.